


theory of gravity

by rjtondale



Category: 5 Seconds of Summer (Band), One Direction (Band)
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, Arguing, Boys Kissing, Exes, Feelings, Fights, Idiots in Love, Kissing, M/M, Making Up, Meddling Friends, Resolved Anger, Resolved Sexual Tension, Touring
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-14
Updated: 2019-08-14
Packaged: 2020-08-23 16:17:01
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,381
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20245711
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rjtondale/pseuds/rjtondale
Summary: michael’s ex turns up at one of his shows.





	theory of gravity

**Author's Note:**

  * For [yehwellwhatever](https://archiveofourown.org/users/yehwellwhatever/gifts).

> for maria, as a get-well-soon wish & an apology for picking a fight. inspired by a line from a friend.

“The fuck are _you_ doing here?” Michael demands.

Niall rolls his eyes. “Saying hello. Maybe this is hard for you to understand, but I still like them.” He jerks his thumb over his shoulder at the rest of the band, then points at Michael. “It’s just you I don’t like.”

“Fuck you, Horan.”

“Mm, no thanks. Tried it. Didn’t live up to the hype.”

Michael gapes for a moment, then shoots back, “Well, maybe if you’d actually put some effort into doing something new every once in awhile, we both would’ve had more fun.”

“Well, maybe if _you’d_ thought about someone other than yourself --”

Ashton, always the mediator, turns around and jumps in before Niall can finish. “Okay, okay, that’s enough of that.” Ash takes hold of Michael’s arm. “Niall, go say hello to Luke, yeah? Mikey…”

Michael can’t resist a glance over his shoulder as Ash leads him to another corner of the room. Niall is watching them go. It may be Michael’s imagination, but he almost looks _sad_ \-- at least until he catches Michael watching and rolls his eyes again.

“Did you know he was coming?” Michael hisses to Ash.

“Yeah. I made him promise not to talk to you. So much for that.”

“Right. When has he ever kept a promise?”

Ash holds up a hand. “I don’t want to hear it. He’s still our friend, okay? At least try to be civil.”

“I can be civil,” Michael promises, forced-calm. But he can’t help but add, “Can he?”

“Yes. Just stay away from each other. I know you have that weird… gravity thing…”

“What --”

“You know exactly what I mean. You orbit each other. Try to fight it, just for today, will you? Leave the room if you have to. It’s only another --” Ashton checks his watch. “-- three hours until the show. Do you think you can handle three hours?”

“Yeah, yeah, I can handle three hours. Will you let go of my arm, now, please? I’m not going back over there. I do not _orbit_ him.”

Ash releases him with a short apology, though he still eyes Michael warily as if he might take off back toward Niall at any moment. Michael considers saying something snarky -- does Ash think he _wants_ to spend his precious pre-show hours being attacked? -- but he settles instead for a simple “thank you.”

And then he does take off, though not toward Niall. He strides away confidently in the other direction, through a doorway, as if he knows where he’s going. The venue is big enough that he’s well and truly lost after only a few turns down identical hallways, but he keeps walking anyway. The more steps he can put between himself and Niall, the better.

Eventually, Michael finds himself in the arena’s balcony. He can’t get much farther from backstage without leaving the building. He collapses into one of the seats with a sigh that sounds melodramatic even to his own ears. Luckily no one else is around to hear; as far as Michael can tell, everyone else is either backstage or on stage, prepping for the show. Where he should be, too.

Niall should’ve been the one to leave. This is _Michael’s_ show -- well, his band’s show -- and no one forced Niall to be here. It’s not Michael’s fault Niall is incapable of staying away from him. He should’ve stayed backstage, talked to a bandmate or a crewmember or his fans on Twitter, ignoring Niall. Claiming his territory.

But it’s kind of nice up here. It’s quiet. He can hear himself think, for once. He can watch the activity on the stage from a bird's eye perspective.

Michael forces himself to think about anything but Niall. He runs through the show’s setlist, the same one they’ve done countless times before, in his head twice. He thinks about their previous tour stops, and their next ones, and the game he’ll play when he gets back on the bus. He starts to think about what his friends are doing right now, but that’s a little too close to thinking about _him_.

Before he can come up with a good redirection, Michael hears footsteps behind him. He still has two hours before showtime; if Ashton is coming to look for him already --

It’s not Ashton. It’s Niall. Because of course it is.

“You --” Michael starts. Then he remembers his promise to be civil, cuts himself off, and turns back around to face the stage. Maybe if he ignores Niall, he’ll go away.

“What are you doing up here?” Niall asks.

“Avoiding you. How did you find me?”

“Didn’t mean to.” Niall’s footsteps get closer, then Michael hears him sit down a row back. “Just wandering.”

“Oh,” Michael says.

The “gravity” thing is bullshit, and Michael knows it; he and Niall don’t orbit each other. But still, it’s a little disconcerting that out of hundreds of sections of seats, miles of hallways, countless side rooms, Niall chose _here_ to wander.

“Do you still get nervous?” Niall asks suddenly.

Michael, caught off-guard, blinks. “What, talking to you?”

“No, you twit. Before the show.” He can feel Niall’s eyes rolling again.

“Oh. Not really,” Michael lies. “Do you?”

Niall doesn’t answer. There’s a brief pause, and then he says, “Remember when we used to come up here before our shows?”

“To make out,” Michael snorts.

“Well, yeah. Sometimes. But not every time.”

“No. Not every time.” Michael leans back and puts his feet up on the seat in front of him. He still doesn’t turn around. “What, you’re going to tell me you miss it or something?”

“Fuck, no. Just remembering. I don’t have anyone to talk to like that before shows anymore.”

As badly as Michael’s mouth wants to form the words, he refuses to say _me neither_. Niall doesn’t need to know that. He’d probably interpret it wrong, anyway. It’s not like Michael misses talking to him. It would just be a statement of fact.

Instead, he lets a few more beats of silence pass. Then he asks, “Why are you here?”

“Told you. I was just wandering.”

“No, you twit. At the show.”

“Told you that, too.” Even with his back turned, Michael can picture Niall’s shrug. “I still like your band. Figured, while you’re in my country, might as well pop over.”

“And you thought, what, I wasn’t going to be here?”

“No. Just that I’d stay away from you.”

“So much for that.”

“Yeah. So much for that.”

There’s another pause, a longer one. Michael is uncomfortably conscious of Niall behind him. He can feel him watching. It’s like there’s a tiny thread lassoed around his heart, and with every breath, the desire to turn around and look at Niall is harder to resist. The longer he pushes against it, the harder the thread digs in.

But he doesn’t turn around, even when Niall says, very quietly, “I do miss talking to you.”

Michael’s breath catches and the thread constricts even tighter. It’s starting to hurt, but he can’t admit it. He doesn’t want this. “Yeah, well. That makes one of us.”

“You’ve always been a shit liar, Clifford.”

“Yeah, well, you were a shit boyfriend, Horan.”

Niall laughs, no humor in it. “You weren’t exactly a gem yourself. All I wanted was to spend some time with you.”

“Then why didn’t you ever come with me when I went out? Or stay with me when I stayed in? If you made even an ounce of effort --”

“I didn’t want to go out because that’s not fun for me every single night,” Niall interrupts. “Nor is staying in with you when all you want to do is sleep because you’re exhausted from going out. Why couldn’t we have just gone to dinner every now and then? Or is that not exciting enough?”

“Fuck you.”

Silence.

“What?” Michael prompts. “No comeback? Nothing about the ‘hype?’”

“No,” Niall says.

Another beat passes.

Michael sighs. “You still could’ve gone out with me. Not every night, maybe, but we could’ve spent more time together.”

“And you could’ve come out with me.”

Michael, stunned, is briefly speechless. He doesn’t miss this one bit -- Niall twisting his words around to fit his own point. He was always too good at that, always half a step ahead of Michael. “You know we couldn’t,” he finally manages.

“Why not?”

“I --” Michael starts, but now that he thinks about it, he can’t actually put his finger on a reason. There had to be something, but --

“Yeah, that’s what I thought,” Niall says.

“It was a long time ago, okay? I don’t remember why we couldn’t. I just know we couldn’t.”

“Because you were scared.”

“Because _your_ management --”

Niall groans. “Oh, God, the management.”

“Yeah. If I’m scared of anything, it’s them.” Michael regrets saying it almost as soon as it’s out; he wasn’t scared then, and he’s not now. Or if he was, he doesn’t want Niall to know it. “Why don’t you come out today, if it’s that important to you?”

Silence.

“Who’s scared now?”

More silence.

Maybe Niall left. Maybe he’s just as sick of fighting as Michael is. But he’s the one who brought it up -- if he didn’t want to discuss it, he shouldn’t have mentioned it. Michael bites his lip. He doesn’t want to turn around to check, but it’s so quiet now, and the pressure from the thread around his heart is almost unbearable. He probably left.

He didn’t leave. Niall is still there, staring out over Michael’s head, silent tears streaming down his cheeks. The thread snaps.

“I’ve never felt for anybody else what I felt for you, Mike,” Niall says. The tears are still coming, but his voice hardly wavers. “There’s no point in coming out now. I don’t think I’ll ever find someone of any gender who I love as much as I loved you.”

“Niall, don’t.”

Niall ignores him. “You were a shit boyfriend, but so was I. We were young and dumb.” He draws in a shaky breath. “I think about you every day. What-ifs. If we met now, instead of back then, I think we could --”

“Stop, Niall, please. Don’t say that.”

“Are you going to tell me you never think of me?”

“No. I --” Michael takes a deep breath, too, then turns back around to face the stage. It’s easier to talk when they’re not looking at each other, especially with tears on both of their faces. “I think about you all the time, too. I can’t talk with anyone else like I talked with you.”

That’s not all he thinks about. Niall’s lips, Niall’s hands, Niall’s eyes rolling back in pleasure instead of rolling in contempt. Their bodies pressed together. Niall’s tongue. Niall’s --

He cuts himself off before the thoughts can go any further. “But that doesn’t mean I’m… still in love with you, or anything,” he says. “Or -- fuck, I don’t know. Maybe it does.”

“Maybe it does,” Niall echoes.

“You weren’t just wandering, were you?”

“Yes, I was. But I always seem to find you.”

“Yeah. You do.”

Maybe Ash had a point about gravity.

Michael hesitates. He knows what he wants to do, knows what he _should_ do, but it still feels wrong. But the thread is back, and it _hurts_, and before he can stop himself, he climbs over the seat and sits beside Niall, careful not to touch him.

“What do you want from me?” Michael asks.

Niall laughs again. “Right now? I really want you to kiss me, but I don’t think you --”

He does. Michael grabs Niall’s face with both hands, pulls him in, and stops him with a fierce kiss.

“Oh,” Niall sighs.

They kiss again, and again. It’s not exactly how Michael remembered it -- not better or worse, just not the same. The angle is weird with the armrest between them, and neither of them were entirely ready for this, but they still kiss, desperate to ease the tension of the thread. _This_ is what Michael misses. Being on the same page. Being together.

They part at the same time, as if responding to some invisible signal. Niall touches Michael’s cheek. His palm is callused, but gentle and warm, and Michael has to resist the urge to kiss it. “Mike.”

“I know. Please don’t say it.”

“I have to.”

“No, you don’t.”

“Yes, I do. I’m still in love with you, Mike.”

Michael shakes his head. “No.”

“I never stopped loving you,” Niall continues.

“No.”

“Even when I didn’t like you, I still loved you.”

“No,” Michael says again, but his voice breaks.

“Yes. Listen to me, please, for once in your life. I know you loved me once. Can you really tell me that just… went away?”

Almost a whisper -- “No.”

“Maybe we could give it another shot.”

Michael’s brain says, “No.”

But his heart says, “Yes.”

And his mouth says, “Fuck it,” and kisses Niall again.

It’s not even an enjoyable kiss, physically, with the seat digging into Michael’s side and his hands not quite sure where to rest. But it’s still Niall’s lips again after so long. His tongue. His breath.

His little half-smile when he asks, “Is that a yes?”

“Yes, Niall, fuck. Okay? I don’t want to go another day without talking to you. I don’t want to fight every time we see each other. I don’t want to pretend like I don’t miss you.”

“I think we can do better this time.”

“I hope so.” Michael runs a hand through his hair. “I don’t go out as much anymore.”

“And I won’t push you to come out if you’re not ready.” Niall takes Michael’s hand and knots their fingers together. “We’re still young.”

“But maybe less dumb.”

“Maybe.” Niall kisses their joined hands.

There’s a moment of silence, neither sure what to say.

Michael breaks it. “Now what?”

“You should probably go back soon,” Niall says.

“Yeah.”

Neither moves. It’s too fragile, this quiet. Michael’s thumb strokes the back of Niall’s hand slowly.

“Mike.”

“What.”

“There’s one thing I missed more than talking to you up here.”

Michael smiles, bumping Niall’s shoulder with his own. “I thought it didn’t live up to the hype.”

“It didn’t,” Niall says, “but it was still damn good.”

“Oh, fuck you.”

“If you insist.”


End file.
